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      At Two Summer Festivals, Offerings That Are Gloomy and Grim

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      The Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale host a series of theatrical pieces, both old and new, that seem to reflect our troubled time.ESSEN, Germany — In the constellation of Europe’s performing arts festivals, few make a more contrasting pair than the Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale.The differences begin with the events’ settings. Salzburg, Mozart’s picturesque hometown, nestled in the Alps, lies at the geographical center of Europe. The Ruhr region, Germany’s rust belt, is comparatively isolated. Salzburg boasts stunning mountain vistas, an old town and a fairy-tale castle. The Ruhr region is a linked network of drab postindustrial cities.The Salzburg Festival usually plays host to well-heeled visitors from over 80 countries, while the Ruhrtriennale caters heavily to locals with subsidized tickets.Yet for all their differences, the two festivals share some DNA.When the Flemish impresario Gerard Mortier founded the Ruhrtriennale in 2002, he was coming off a decade of shaking things up as the Salzburg Festival’s artistic director. Although his time there is now seen as a golden age, Mortier’s attempts to nudge the festival in a more artistically daring direction proved wildly contentious at the time. When Mortier arrived in the Ruhr region, his new festival gave him the opportunity to realize large-format experiments that he could never pull off at Salzburg.Two decades later, the Salzburg Festival’s roster of operas and concerts has recaptured something of the boundary-pushing and avant-garde flair of the “Mortier era.” The festival’s dramatic program, however, has struggled to keep up.A silent chorus of nude male performers in Friedrich Schiller’s “Maria Stuart” in Salzburg.Matthias Horn/Salzburg FestivalSalzburg’s outdoor production of “Jedermann,” a morality play written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the festival’s founders, is the event’s oldest tradition. In recent years, little of the Austrian poet and dramatist’s other work has been staged there. This summer, however, as part of the festival’s ongoing centenary festivities, Hofmannsthal’s “The Falun Mine” has taken center stage.Written in 1899, though never performed during its author’s lifetime, “The Falun Mine” is a ghost story composed in the pungently lyrical language of Hofmannsthal’s best early work. It tells the story of a miner beset by strange apparitions and swallowed up by a mountain on his wedding day, and is choked with symbolism, much of which remained inscrutable in the dreary production by the Swiss director Jossi Wieler.The actors declaimed their lines in a highly mannered tone from a rotating stage littered with cinder blocks. It often seemed that the play itself was buried alive under the rubble.A theatrical death knell also sounded for Salzburg’s new production of Friedrich Schiller’s “Maria Stuart.” Despite some powerful images, thanks to a silent chorus of 30 nude male performers, or a single swinging light bulb, Martin Kusej’s stripped-down staging, a coproduction with Vienna’s Burgtheater (where Kusej is the artistic director) fell flat, sabotaged by hammy overacting from nearly every member of the cast.The atmosphere of gloom and doom seemed to spread like a fog from Salzburg to the Ruhr, where a number of the region’s “cathedrals of industry” — the disused factories that have been repurposed as theaters — had a haunted quality at the start of the Ruhrtriennale.From left, Annamária Láng, Katharina Lorenz, Deborah Korley, Michael Maertens, Jan Bülow and Markus Scheumann in Barbara Frey’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” part of the Ruhr Triennale.Matthias Horn/Ruhrtriennale This summer’s program is the first of three to be overseen by Barbara Frey, a Swiss director and the second consecutive woman to run the festival after Stefanie Carp, whose troubled tenure was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on Frey’s work so far, she seems set on restoring the Ruhrtriennale to the provocative and artistically unpredictable spirit of its founder.In her own production of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the edifice in question was the Maschinenhalle Zweckel, the electrical center of a former coal mine in the city of Gladbeck. In this sinister show, another coproduction with the Burgtheater, a close-knit group of eight performers narrated five of Poe’s spine-tingling tales in German, English and Hungarian. With ritualistic precision, they luxuriated in the American writer’s melancholy prose.This atmosphere of suffocating sadness turned gleefully macabre with “The Feast of the Lambs,” a musical theater work written by the Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek and the composer Olga Neuwirth. Based on a play by the British writer Leonora Carrington, it is, like “Usher,” a tale of madness and familial decay.Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Feast of the Lambs.”Volker Beushausen/Ruhrtriennale The directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, of the Dublin-based theater company Dead Center, filled the cavernous Jahrhunderthalle, a former gas power plant in the city of Bochum, with an eye-popping production, complete with trippy video projections, falling snow and a blood-red lake, effectively blurring the boundaries between domestic and outdoor horrors, as well as between human and animal savagery. (You can watch a streamed performance on the festival website).As in “Usher,” the oddball spirit of “Lambs” was tethered to artistic seriousness and skill. Things looked very different for “A Divine Comedy” by Florentina Holzinger. This young Viennese choreographer has gained fame for extreme performances that deconstruct dance history and sexualized representations of the female body.Florentina Holzinger’s “A Divine Comedy” in the city of Duisburg.Katja Illner/RuhrtriennaleHer latest, Dante-inspired outing combines onstage hypnosis, athletic performances, slapstick routines, action painting and pornographic situations to no apparent end. Using the Kraftzentrale, an enormous former power plant in the city of Duisburg, Holzinger and a score of naked female performers ran riot for the better part of two hours, often to seat-rumbling music.Holzinger is part of the incoming artistic team at the Berlin Volksbühne, where “A Divine Comedy” will transfer in late September. It’s a full-on three-ring circus of horrors that was mostly just tedious. I didn’t buy Holzinger’s willfully transgressive spectacle, but apparently I was in the minority: The only thing that truly shocked me about “A Divine Comedy” was how much the audience loved it.I felt there was one artistic work at the Ruhrtriennale that connected to humanity — and it wasn’t in a theater.An installation view of Mats Staub’s “21 — Memories of Growing Up” in a turbine hall in Bochum.Sabrina Less/RuhrtriennaleOver the past decade, the Swiss artist Mats Staub has conducted hundreds of interviews with individuals of various ages and backgrounds for “21 — Memories of Growing Up,” which has been installed in a turbine hall in Bochum. Spread over 50 different stations, the video interviews provide varied reflections on maturity, independence and happiness. The project feels like an archive of human strivings and the possibility for rebirth.Renewal was the watchword at the founding of both the Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale. In 1920, that meant reclaiming and safeguarding European culture after the Great War and the loss of the Habsburg Empire; at the turn of the millennium, it meant rejuvenating a depressed, postindustrial corner of Germany.If the onstage offerings at both events this year have seemed unrelentingly grim, they have at least reflected the struggles of our time. Yet, as we cautiously adjust to living with a pandemic for the foreseeable future, we could desperately use some renewal, too.The Salzburg Festival continues through Aug. 31.The Ruhrtriennale continues through Sept. 25. More

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      Micki Grant, Groundbreaking Broadway Composer, Dies at 92

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      With “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” she became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical.Micki Grant, who in the early 1970s became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical, “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” a soulful, spirited exploration of Black life, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 92.Her death, at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, was announced by Joan Allen, a family spokeswoman.Ms. Grant, an actress, composer, playwright and musician, had developed “Don’t Bother Me” for two years with the director Vinnette Carroll, taking it to small theaters in New York, Philadelphia and Washington before opening on Broadway in April 1972.She would also be known for her work on another Broadway musical, “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” and for her seven years on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”Set in New York City, “Don’t Bother Me” explored topics like ghetto life, Black power, feminism and student protests with an all-Black cast performing songs — all by Ms. Grant — that drew from rock, jazz, funk, blues calypso and other musical genres.Ms. Grant recalled in 2018 that she and Ms. Carroll had wanted audiences of the musical to recognize the similarities among races, not the differences.“And I think that’s expressed when you find out in the end that the audience is willing to reach out and take someone’s hand,” she said in an interview with The New York Amsterdam News. “Some people in the audience never held the hand of a person of a different race before, and all of the sudden, they’re holding another person’s hand.”The musical got rave reviews, including one from Clive Barnes of The New York Times, who wrote: “It is the unexpected that is the most delightful. Last night at the Playhouse Theater a new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”The show received Tony nominations for best musical, best original score, best book (also by Ms. Grant) and best direction. It won a Grammy for best musical theater album, making Ms. Grant the first female composer to win in that category.“Don’t Bother Me” was revived in 2016 as a concert performance by the York Theater Company in Manhattan and two years later by the Encores! Off-Center series at New York City Center, directed by Savion Glover.Amber Barbee Pickens, foreground, in the Encores! production of “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” at New York City Center in 2018. One critic said of the original Broadway production: “A new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJames Morgan, York’s producing artistic director, said in a phone interview that Ms. Grant had “wanted a say in everything and would say, ‘No, that’s not how that goes.’ I’d tell her, ‘We want this to be your version of the show.’”He had been hoping to stage a full Off Broadway production of “Don’t Worry,” he said, but couldn’t raise the money. “I so wanted it for her, because there’s still a big audience for it,” he said.Ms. Grant was born Minnie Louise Perkins on June 30, 1929, in Chicago to Oscar and Gussie (Cobbins) Perkins. Her father was a barber and a self-taught pianist, her mother, a saleswoman for Stanley Home Products.Minnie was smitten by theater and music at a young age. At 8 she played the Spirit of Spring, touching flowers to bring them to life, in a community center production. She began taking piano and double-bass lessons at about the same age.And, she recalled in an interview with The Times in 1972: “I was busy writing poetry and walking around the house reciting it. My family always listened and said what nice poetry it was.”Ms. Grant began writing music at 14 or 15 and acting in community theater at 18. She studied at the Chicago School of Music and later attended the University of Illinois, Chicago.But one semester shy of graduating, she left to perform in Los Angeles, where, in 1961, she appeared in a musical revue, “Fly Blackbird,” a social satire about the evils of segregation. She moved with the show to its Off Broadway production in 1962.By then, she had changed her name to Micki.Ms. Grant made her Broadway debut a year later in a supporting role in “Tambourines to Glory,” a short-lived “gospel singing play” — written by the poet Langston Hughes with music by Jobe Huntley — about two female street preachers in Harlem. It also starred Robert Guillaume and Louis Gossett Jr. A year later she appeared in a revival of Marc Blitzstein’s musical play “The Cradle Will Rock,” set in 1937 during the Great Depression.She turned to television in 1965, beginning a seven-year run on “Another World” playing a secretary-turned-lawyer, Peggy Nolan. She is believed to have been the first Black contract player in soaps. She later had roles in the soap operas “Guiding Light,” “Edge of Night” and “All My Children.”Ms. Grant in the NBC soap opera “Another World” in 1968. She had a seven-year run on the show playing a secretary-turned-lawyer.Fred Hermansky/NBCCasey Childs, the founder of the Primary Stages Company in New York, recalled directing her in one soap opera episode. “She was an absolutely lovely actress, who understood the need on a soap to move quickly and make fast choices,” he said in an interview.During her long run on “Another World,” Ms. Grant was building a theatrical legacy with Ms. Carroll, who in 1967 founded the Urban Arts Corps to provide a showcase for Black and Puerto Rican performers.They put together the first production of “Don’t Bother Me” in 1970 at the company’s theater on West 20th Street in Manhattan. Ms. Grant also wrote the music and lyrics for a song and dance version of the Irwin Shaw novel “Bury the Dead” and for a children’s show called “Croesus and the Witch.”Working with Ms. Carroll, she said, was a “magical” experience.“It all came together so perfectly,” Ms. Grant told American Theater magazine in an interview this year. “It was a fortunate meeting between us: I needed somewhere to present my work, and she needed the new work to present because of who she was — having original works brought out her creativity, rather than trying to repeat something that was already done.”The two women also collaborated on “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” an acclaimed gospel-infused musical that opened on Broadway in 1976 and ran for 429 performances. Ms. Carroll wrote the book, and music and lyrics were by Alex Bradford, with additional songs by Ms. Grant.Two years later, Ms. Grant was one of the five songwriters behind the musical “Working,” which was based on the writer Studs Terkel’s book of interviews with everyday people about their jobs. The group was nominated for a Tony for best original score.In one of Ms. Grant’s songs in “Working,” a woman laments: “If I could’ve done what I could’ve done/I could’ve done big things./With some luck to do what I wanted to do/I would’ve done big things./Swam a few rivers/Climbed a few hills/Paid all my bills.”She returned to Broadway one last time, with a musical, “It’s So Nice to Be Civilized” (1980), which closed after eight performances.Her other credits include the English-language lyrics to songs in “Jacques Brel Blues,” which debuted in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1988, and “Don’t Underestimate a Nut,” a musical based on the life of George Washington Carver, the agricultural scientist who promoted the cultivation of peanuts. It was commissioned by a children’s theater in Omaha, Neb., in 1994.In the late 1990s, Ms. Grant spent two years with Lizan Mitchell on a tour of the United States and South Africa as they played the centenarian Delany sisters in “Having Our Say,” Emily Mann’s Tony Award-winning play.Ms. Grant had no immediate survivors. Her marriages to Milton Grant and Ray McCutcheon ended in divorce.When Encores! revived “Don’t Bother Me,” Ms. Grant, reflecting on its creation, said that her and Ms. Carroll’s goal had not been to produce an incendiary musical about the difficulties faced by Black people in America.“There was a lot of angry theater out there at the time, especially in the Black community — Bullins, Jones,” she said, referring to the playwrights Ed Bullins and LeRoi Jones, who became known as Amiri Baraka. “I wanted to come at it with a soft fist. I wanted to open eyes but not turn eyes away.” More

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      Review: In ‘Islander,’ the Puck Stops Here

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      This verbatim hockey drama considers issues of masculinity and the peculiar ownership that fans feel toward a team and its players.The 2017 season didn’t start too badly. The New York Islanders, a National Hockey League team with a new coach and a newish berth at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, might have allowed a few too many shots on goal, but they still won most of their games. A couple of months later, in December, it all began to go wrong. Then it went more wrong. The defense fell apart. The team missed the playoffs. John Tavares, the Islanders’ captain and star player, departed for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Fans revolted.The director Katie Brook and the playwright Liza Birkenmeier, hockey fans both, have scraped some of that bad ice into “Islander,” a verbatim piece at HERE. Presented by Tele-Violet and supported by New Georges, the play borrows commentary from the season and puts it in the mouth of a bearded, sweatpants-clad, aggressively average dude called Man (David Gould). (The sources aren’t listed, but Man’s language suggests live broadcast commentary, postgame interviews and fan forums.)Additional text is culled from the celebrity academic and men’s rights stan Jordan Peterson. Imagine a snow cone that’s part obsession, part self-justification, part masculine fragility, sweetened with self-pity and sweat, and you’re mostly there.Brook and Birkenmeier (“Dr. Ride’s American Beach House”) are interested in questions of identity, identification and form. They have structured “Islander” a little like a game. It begins with the national anthem and pauses for a halftime dance break. A bare stage, carpeted in rubber tiles, stands in for the rink. (The set and lighting design are by Josh Smith.) But there’s just one player — and then toward the end, a second (Dick Toth) and a third (Aksel Latham-Mitchell, a child actor who also provides a drum solo). If you’re looking for the nail-biting narrative propulsion of a proper game, look elsewhere. A buzzer beater, “Islander” is not.It does, though, probe some fascinating ideas, like the peculiar ownership that fans feel toward a team and its players — a level of mimetic engagement that theater rarely achieves, Broadway musicals excepted. No man is an island, but a lot of men, recliner-bound and alone with their Wi-Fi, seem to consider themselves Islanders. And fan forums and postgame debriefs provide the rare spaces in American life where men are actively encouraged to talk about their feelings. In these homosocial arenas, they confess their self-doubt, their disappointment and their feelings of low self-worth.Gould, air guitaring away self-doubt and disappointment in “Islanders.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m very arrogant,” Man says. “I’m very lost within myself. I’m as sick of me as you are.” (Less helpfully, these are also spaces for some men to justify their mediocrity.) But the script — a latticework of unconnected observations — has a way of flattening out these ideas, compressing them like the air mattress that Latham-Mitchell’s John Tavares cheerfully deflates.“Islander” isn’t long, just 75 minutes, about the same as a hockey game. But since it offers so little in the way of plot or character, it feels longer. The language of commentary isn’t particularly interesting, though there are blazes of figuration (“He makes them as uncomfortable as a beached whale”), a few snappy neologisms (“Sneakery: Is that a word?”) and the occasional metaphor melee.While Gould is a charmer — precise, inexhaustible, brave enough to dance with his shirt off — there is only so much an actor can do when stringing together disjointed fan forum posts and meditations that only an extremely concussed Marcus Aurelius might write: “Good is the enemy of great. No more good; it’s time to be great.”Maybe “Islander,” like many N.H.L. games, is better experienced via a highlights reel.IslanderThrough Sept. 4 at HERE, Manhattan; 212-647-0202, Here.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Virus Fears Prompt a Major New York Theater to Postpone Its Return

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      As the Delta variant spreads, Signature Theater delayed its planned October opening of “Infinite Life,” a new play by Annie Baker.Signature Theater, a prominent Off Broadway nonprofit, has postponed its return to the stage over concerns about the persistent coronavirus pandemic, becoming the first major New York theater to take such a step.The theater’s leadership announced the postponement Friday afternoon, just days before rehearsals were to begin for “Infinite Life,” a new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker, who was also planning to direct the work. The production was supposed to run from Oct. 5 to Nov. 7.“Due to ongoing health and safety concerns, Signature Theater and Annie Baker have decided to postpone the upcoming production of ‘Infinite Life,’” the theater said in a statement. “Signature will continue, in discussion with artists, to evaluate on a case-by-case basis how to proceed with other programming planned for this season. The company and artist agree that this is the best choice for this show at this time.”Around the country, there have been a number of cancellations and postponements of pop music tour dates and festivals because of the rise in coronavirus cases caused by the spread of the Delta variant. There have been several theater postponements in California, including at Berkeley Repertory Theater, which recently cited the Delta variant in delaying until next year a Christina Anderson play that had been scheduled to begin in October.It is unclear whether the postponement of “Infinite Life” is an outlier or a first indication that the theater industry is getting cold feet about the many reopenings planned in New York this fall, on Broadway and off. Two Broadway shows, “Springsteen on Broadway” and “Pass Over,” are already running, and 15 more plan to start next month; there are also some plays already running in commercial and nonprofit venues around the city, and many of the city’s larger nonprofits plan to resume presenting shows during the fall.Broadway theaters are requiring audience members to show proof of vaccination and wear masks. And Mayor Bill de Blasio has declared that all performing arts theaters must require proof of vaccination as part of a mandate that applies to indoor dining, entertainment, and fitness.Signature said it was still hoping to stage a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” in October. Although “Infinite Life” would have been its first stage production since the start of the pandemic, it would not have been the first use of its building: This summer, the nonprofit featured an installation called “The Watering Hole,” conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon, in its Frank Gehry-designed home, the Pershing Square Signature Center, a few blocks west of Times Square.Baker, who won a Pulitzer in 2014 for “The Flick,” writes plays that are sometimes hard to describe, and very little has been released about this one, but a spokesman said there was a six-person cast. In news releases, the theater has described “Infinite Life” as “a play about no end in sight” and “a new play that tackles persistent pain and desire.” More

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      Review: ‘Pass Over’ Comes to Broadway, in Horror and Hope

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      Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s play about young Black men in peril inaugurates the new season with unexpected joy.On Wednesday night, when a preshow announcement informed the 1,200 or so people at the August Wilson Theater that they were “one of the first audiences back to see a real Broadway play,” the response was the kind of roar you’d expect for a beloved diva returning from rehab. And “Pass Over,” by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, does not disappoint in that regard. Having survived pandemic jitters (so far) and its own circuitous path to get there, it emerged like a star: in top shape, at full throttle and refreshed by some artful doctoring.If it seems strange to talk about a tragedy in such terms, keep in mind that though “Pass Over” is forthrightly centered on the plight of two young Black men in an urban police state, its ambition is so far-reaching that it embraces (and in Danya Taymor’s thriller of a production, succeeds as) comedy, melodrama and even vaudeville. In that, it emulates the vision and variety of its most direct sources: “Waiting for Godot,” the Samuel Beckett play about tramps biding their time in eternity, and the Book of Exodus, about an enslaved people seeking the Promised Land.In “Pass Over,” the tramps and the enslaved are combined in the characters of Moses (Jon Michael Hill) and Kitch (Namir Smallwood). They are men of our current time who live on the streets of a city not unlike Chicago, yet also on a pre-Emancipation plantation and in Egypt more than three millenniums ago.The history of slavery everywhere is a heavy symbolic weight for individual characters to carry, but the suffering of men like Moses and Kitch in a racist society right now is not out of proportion to that of their forebears. When they try to make a list of everyone they know who has “been kilt” by the police, it takes a very long time to name them while also distinguishing their particulars. Among many others there are Ed with the dreadlocks (not light-skinned Ed), “dat tall dude got dat elbow rash,” Kev and “dat otha” Kev, Mike with “dat messed up knee.”They expect at any moment to be next.Yet as Moses and Kitch move through a day’s attempts at diversion from this horror, including their oft-rehearsed roughhousing routines and games of “Promised Land Top 10” — Kitch wants a pair of new (but “not thrift store new”) Air Jordans — Nwandu forces us to look beyond their struggle to their full humanity. Despite their encounters with a clueless white gentleman called Mister and an enraged police officer called Ossifer (both played by Gabriel Ebert) they remain witty and warmhearted, belligerent only to cover their need for each other, and filled with big dreams accompanied by the almost unbearable burden of hope.Their biggest dream is to “pass over” — an equivocal phrase that shifts its meaning as the 95-minute play moves through various theatrical genres. (There’s no intermission; in an introduction to the script, Nwandu writes that if Moses and Kitch can’t leave, “neither can you.”)At first, “pass over” means simply to get off the streets: to achieve, if not the fine foods and soft sheets on their Top 10 lists, then at least a decent meal and a bed that is not made of sidewalk. Later the phrase takes on larger meaning as their plight evokes and even merges with that of Black people escaping slavery and the biblical Israelites recalled on Passover. Yet later it becomes part of a suicide pact by which they hope to end their suffering together, and “pass over” into paradise.Many of these moments may be familiar to you if you know “Waiting for Godot,” in which Beckett’s tramps similarly rehearse old routines, contemplate hanging themselves from a spindly tree, deal with mystifying visitors and share their moldy turnips. (In “Pass Over,” the tree becomes a lamppost; the turnips, a pizza crust.) Yet even in earlier versions of the play — originally produced by Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in 2017, then filmed by Spike Lee and revised for Lincoln Center Theater in 2018 — Nwandu never bound herself to her templates, leaving Beckett’s absurdism behind as the needs of her particular story required. Those needs took her to strange places.From left, Smallwood, Hill and Gabriel Ebert, as Ossifer, who is not a caricature so much as a compendium of sadistic police officer tropes. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn rewriting for Broadway, she has gone even further. Not only has she decided to push the play past tragedy into something else, but she has also, in its last 10 minutes, let its innate surrealism fully flower in a daring and self-consciously theatrical way. (The transformation is gorgeously rendered in Wilson Chin’s scenic design, Marcus Doshi’s lighting, Justin Ellington’s sound and even, in their removal, Sarafina Bush’s costumes.) Somehow Nwandu gives us the recognition of horror that has informed drama since the Greeks while also providing the relief of joy — however irrational — that calls to mind the ecstasies of gospel, splatter flicks and classic musicals, all of which are sampled.Taymor’s production could hardly support that vision better. Though I was at first troubled by how strongly she stresses the comedy — given the almost ritualized clowning, it was no surprise to see Bill Irwin credited as a movement consultant — it soon became clear that allowing the humor full rein allows the same to terror. In pushing both extremes further forward, often letting them spill into the theater with winks and shocks, Taymor asks the audience to accept its role in the story and perhaps also its complicity.She has also shaped the performances, which were already excellent three years ago, into something that seems to go deeper than acting. Like Laurel and Hardy, who were surely among Beckett’s models for his tramps, Hill and Smallwood have a kind of anti-chemistry that draws them closer the more they squabble.Hill, as befits a character named Moses, has the heavier burden of a vision to carry out; you can see his body resist the weight and then wonderfully, if only temporarily, lift it. Smallwood, as Kitch, the epitome of a pesky younger brother, knows just how to get under Moses’s skin because that’s where he needs to be for safety. For both of them, “You feel me?” is almost a password.Of course, when Mister hears it, he fails to understand. “I’d rather not,” he says.As Mister, Ebert manages the virtuoso trick of making obtuseness both weird and charming, at least for a while. But watch him try to sit down at one point, his lanky body becoming an expression of hypocrisy as he snakes one way then slumps the other. Later, when Ebert returns as Ossifer, hard and unbending, you barely know him, and certainly don’t want to.Ossifer is not a caricature so much as a compendium of sadistic police officer tropes. Yet Nwandu’s larger view makes the choice to write him that way more than an expedience. Without ever forgetting its origin in American racism, “Pass Over” broadens to include every kind of -ism, including the ultimately unanswerable one of existentialism. She is asking not only why Black men must live in fear of having their bodily integrity stolen but also why all humans must, in any age and place.And if she waffles a bit near the end, never quite landing the final leap across the river, she lets us bathe in the hope of it anyway. After all, as the roar at the start of the show announced, we have already begun to pass over some things; the existence of “Pass Over” on Broadway is proof of that. Do we dare to hope that as a new season begins, new promised lands are possible too?Pass OverTickets Through Oct. 10 at the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan; passoverbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Staging ‘The Glass Menagerie’ on the Fire Escapes That Inspired It

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      At Tennessee Williams’s childhood apartment in St. Louis, one of his most famous works has become an immersive event.ST. LOUIS — There’s a knowing twinkle in Tom Wingfield’s eye.He’s standing out on the second-floor fire escape, delivering the opening monologue of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” like a magician who knows his audience recognizes the trick. Wingfield, the play’s narrator and a thinly veiled self-portrait of Williams himself, played here by Bradley James Tejeda, sets the scene: “I take you back to an alley in St. Louis.”And there’s that twinkle, reminding us where we are.We’re not just in St. Louis, where Williams grew up and where his semi-autobiographical memory play unfolds. And not just in an alley, in the parking lot behind a fire-escape-covered apartment building much like the one where the Wingfield family might reside.Brenda Currin, left, and Bradley James Tejeda on a fire escape at 4633 Westminster Place in St. Louis.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesWe are on the corner of Westminster and Walton in the city’s Central West End neighborhood, outside the actual apartment building where Williams once lived. These are the fire escapes that likely helped inspire “The Glass Menagerie” in the first place.Williams’s family moved to 4633 Westminster Place — now called “The Tennessee” — from Mississippi in 1918, when Williams was 7, and lived there for four years before moving elsewhere in the city. He was long gone by the time he wrote “The Glass Menagerie,” his first hit, in 1944 — but this production, which opened Thursday from the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis, still feels unexpectedly immersive, with a set that stretches from a small stage in the parking lot to the existing maze of metal walkways that cover the side of the building.“We’re using fire escapes that he probably walked on,” the director, Brian Hohlfeld, said in an interview the week of opening night, adding, “It is very humbling and very daunting.”Hohlfeld and Carrie Houk, the festival’s executive artistic director, had initially targeted a local auditorium with ties to Williams’s early theater career for a 2020 “Menagerie” production. (That edition, last November, became a radio play.) As they weighed venue options for this year’s festival with health and safety considerations during the pandemic, the apartments seemed to be a serendipitous fit.The director, Brian Hohlfeld, left, and the executive artistic director, Carrie Houk, before a performance.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesHouk tracked down the owner of the building through Airbnb, where most of the nine units are available to rent — “The boyhood home of playwright Tennessee Williams” is listed as a main draw, with the going rate at the time of publication around $160 a night. The owner, Houk said in an interview, gave an immediate yes.Hohlfeld, a St. Louis native who now lives in California, and the cast — which also includes Brenda Currin, Elizabeth Teeter and Chauncy Thomas — are staying on location in the apartments during the run, which ends on Aug. 29. The housing decision was made, in part, to meet the Actors’ Equity Association’s ventilation guidelines — and frankly, Houk said, they needed the doorway. Many of the show’s entrances and exits are made through the back door of one of the units, to and from the second-floor fire escape.The festival has had the typical concerns that most open-air productions have — mainly, the unpredictability of St. Louis weather in August. But unlike other outdoor undertakings here — the Muny and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival have both dealt with their fair share of rainy Missouri summers — putting on a show in an active neighborhood, on a residential street, comes with its own challenges.“Yesterday during rehearsal, this guy comes out to empty his trash. He walked down three stories with his trash bag, and we had to direct him toward the trash bin,” Hohlfeld said. “He was polite enough to go around front when he came back.”Opening night conditions were slightly better. Actors only had to compete with a car alarm, a distant siren or two and a passing car’s thumping bass in the alley.Watching a play on a residential street comes with challenges.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesBut, Hohlfeld conceded, the ambience can also add something neat: “Occasionally lights will be turned on in the units, turned off, and it just gives it real life.”At least from the outside, nearby residents don’t seem to mind the noise — most passers-by on Thursday night stopped to take in a scene or two from the sidewalk, and a neighbor gave a standing ovation from the porch next door.“One of the things we were worried about is the neighbors complaining,” Houk said, “but I think they’re fascinated by it.”St. Louis is admittedly an odd location for a festival celebrating Williams, considering that it’s a place he notoriously despised. “When the Williams family moved to St. Louis from the South, it was a different St. Louis than it is now,” Houk said.Houk, who added that getting the festival started several years ago was a “battle” for that reason, thinks Williams didn’t hate the city so much as his family’s circumstances, many of which are on display in “The Glass Menagerie.”“It’s really about how he was trying desperately to get out of St. Louis, but at the same time, it captures the city and why he wanted to get out,” Hohlfeld said. “I think if he had moved here at a different time, he might have had a different attitude.”Still, the script is riddled with plenty of St. Louis references, all of which serve as additional winks to the audience: mentions of Washington University, where Williams attended for a time, and of several institutions in Forest Park (a bucolic spot that easily rivals Central Park, to anyone you ask here) — the art museum, the zoo’s massive 1904 World’s Fair bird cage and the Jewel Box greenhouse.And on Thursday night, in case any further reminder was needed of exactly where we were, one man stretching his legs during intermission posed the most familiar and inconsequential St. Louis greeting there is: Where, he wondered, did Williams go to high school? 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      Dudes on Ice: A Play About Hockey Tackles Masculinity, Too

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      “Islander,” a skewed look at a New York Islanders season, examines extreme fandom, violence and the thrill of sports.Hockey is a brutal game: In what other sport are missing teeth a badge of honor? Not that Liza Birkenmeier and Katie Brook were in any danger of losing Chiclets as they stared down a puck: Not only were they playing air hockey instead of the ice-rink version, but they also seemed to prefer huddling on the same side of the table rather than face each other.Clearly Birkenmeier, a playwright, and Brook, a director, like being on the same team. They started working together almost 10 years ago and their fruitful collaboration includes the well-received “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” and the new “Islander,” a skewed look at the New York Islanders’ fateful 2017-18 season, when the team failed to make the playoffs and its star, John Tavares, was about to become a free agent. (The show was originally slated for March 2020 and opened Saturday at HERE Arts Center.)There have been quite a few sports-themed plays by women in recent years, most notably Sarah DeLappe’s soccer-centric hit “The Wolves” and Lydia R. Diamond’s portrait of a barrier-shattering baseball player, “Toni Stone,” but they have focused on the female athletic experience.“Islander,” on the other hand, zeros in on “dudes doing dude stuff,” as Birkenmeier put it. An extreme version of dude stuff: Professional hockey is “unhinged and violent and white,” she said. In other words, it provides a fine lens through which to look at modern masculinity and its discontents.John Tavares playing for the New York Islanders in 2017. He was the team’s star and was about to become a free agent.Nick Wass/Associated PressTo do so, Birkenmeier, 35, and Brook, 39, pulled lines from game commentary and analysis, and podcasts like “Islanders Anxiety.” Then those sources were edited into a quasi-monologue for a composite character referred to simply as Man (David Gould) — so “Islander” is also a sly reflection on solo shows by the likes of Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray.There is a certain affection, too, as Birkenmeier and Brook enjoy watching hockey, not just using it as a decoder ring for male behavior. A few days before previews started, the two women turned up at a Brooklyn games emporium for a chat about pucks and violence. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The show’s narrator is obsessive, whiny, triumphant, analytical, bellicose, despondent — all the stages of fandom. What impression are you trying to create?LIZA BIRKENMEIER We’re highlighting the ridiculousness of his struggle as opposed to empathizing with it.KATIE BROOK We’re leaning into the haplessness of it: It’s not a hero’s journey, although he thinks it is. The dance we do is to engage the audience enough that you think you’re going along with him and then you kind of back off.Do you think professional sports foster a kind of stereotypical masculinity, or do they help channel it so the rest of us are a little bit safer?BROOK [Laughs] It’s a good outlet but it also reinforces things that I think are bad. Amateur sports are actually wonderful and must be kept separate in some ways, but professional sports, in part just because of the basics of capitalism, have to be violent and extreme. Basketball is not that way.BIRKENMEIER Or baseball. Hockey really points to a sort of dignity culture: If somebody gets in your goalie’s way, it’s part of the game to go up and punch that guy. It’s part of the sensationalism. I do think it’s very poisonous. The ideas of legacy and dignity and loyalty come up so violently.According to Birkenmeier, right, “Hockey really points to a sort of dignity culture: If somebody gets in your goalie’s way, it’s part of the game to go up and punch that guy.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesWhy do you think theater hasn’t really tackled hard-core fandoms, either in sports or pop culture, considering the huge part they play in modern life?BROOK I don’t think there’s a lot of satire in theater these days. That may be part of it. Also a well-made play is based on things that we should all be able to relate to, like real estate. A lot of them hinge on the loss of the family home or whatever — some big events that everyone can agree is a big deal. But people can’t really relate to most obsessions. Those people are all on the same page about how important it is — it’s for them, not for us.BIRKENMEIER Sometimes we underestimate that sports is better theater: It’s so much like a play except you literally don’t know what’s going to happen and somebody has to win. A hockey game as a community event is potentially more exciting than a play.BROOK Well, most people think that.What was it like researching the show?BIRKENMEIER Watching the games at bars, I would sit and take notes and men would quiz me. They wouldn’t believe that I was into it. They would ask, “Who’s your favorite player?”BROOK That’s a softball question.BIRKENMEIER It is, and often they’d be like, “Is your favorite player John Tavares?” Or ask me what I thought of the last game. Or ask me what I thought of the new or old management, or whose contract was going to be up.BROOK Insulting flirting: They want to show that they’re smarter than you, but it’s supposed to be a flirtation.BIRKENMEIER Oh my God, I never took it as flirtation! I would have been more flattered. One guy was really excited about the play.Did you go to many games as well?BROOK We went to a bunch of games in Brooklyn and no one was there. After John Tavares left the [Islanders] and joined the [Toronto] Maple Leafs, I went to Nassau Coliseum at the first game against the Leafs and it was horrific. The fans were so angry, they kept yelling “We don’t need you!” every time John came on the ice. It was scary, actually. It’s not a show about violence but there is a sort of underlying fear that this guy [the narrator] is threatening, somehow.BIRKENMEIER I generally think it’s important to be funny. It’s very easy to take this and to take a serious skewering look at it.BROOK No one needs to suffer right now.BIRKENMEIER Let’s have fun, you know? More

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      La MaMa’s Season Includes an Indigenous Take on Shakespeare

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      A version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is planned, along with the company’s puppet series, an examination of the Tulsa Race Massacre and more.In a season that is expected to include the reopening of its flagship theater after a three-year, $24 million renovation, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club will present an Indigenous take on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a theatrical examination of the Tulsa Race Massacre and a vaudeville concert that explores the history of cannabis.“We’re in a revolutionary time right now,” Mia Yoo, the artistic director of the theater, on the Lower East Side, said in an interview, “and we need to think about who the voices are that we need to look to to guide us.”The original home of La MaMa, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, is at 74A East Fourth Street. It is slated to reopen in January with two flexible, acoustically separated theaters; green rooms; a cafe; and an open-air roof terrace. All of the shows this season will take place at two of the company’s other spaces — the Ellen Stewart Theater and the Downstairs, both at 66 East Fourth Street. When 74A is reopened there will be an additional slate of productions announced.The season will kick off with the La MaMa Puppet Series (Sept. 27-Oct. 24), a biannual festival of new contemporary puppet theater. It will be followed by in-person and online performances of “A Few Deep Breaths” (Oct. 27-30), a collaboration among seven writers, including Adrienne Kennedy, Chuck Mee and Robert Patrick, that premiered online at La MaMa in June and is a co-presentation with CultureHub, La MaMa’s digital arts division.The world premiere of James E. Reynolds’s “History/Our Story: The Trail to Tulsa” will run Dec. 9 through Dec. 12. Dance, music and spoken word performances will examine the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of America’s deadliest outbreaks of racial violence. There will be a post-performance audience discussion following the show.In January, La MaMa, HERE Arts Center and the Prototype Festival will present the world premiere of Talvin Wilks and Baba Israel’s “Cannabis: A Viper Vaudeville,” exploring the history of the plant through music, dance and spoken word. Also in January, the choreographer and director Martha Clarke’s “God’s Fool,” an interpretation of the story of St. Francis of Assisi, will have its world premiere.The world premiere of “Misdemeanor Dream,” a Native American adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will open in March. The production, which has a cast of 20 Indigenous actors, will be performed by Spiderwoman Theater, an all-women Native American company, and directed by Muriel Miguel, the company’s founder and artistic director.Later in the spring, Qendra Multimedia, a Kosovo-based cultural organization that focuses on contemporary theater and literature, and La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company will present the U.S. premiere of “Balkan Bordello,” a play aiming to expose the fragility of democracy within the framework of Aeschylus’ tragedy Oresteia. And concluding the season, in May, will be the New York premiere of Elizabeth Swados’s reimagined musical composition “The Beautiful Lady,” which adapts the words of Russian poets who lived and performed in St. Petersburg during the 1917 Russian Revolution. It will be directed by Anne Bogart, one of the founders of SITI Company, which will take its final bow in 2022.Audience members must show proof of vaccination to attend performances, and masks are required at all times. Children under the age of 12 are welcome, but must be masked. For more information, visit lamama.org. More